My View: Stand for love and justice and mercy

By Violet Johnicker

Saturday

Jan 12, 2019 at 11:00 AM

If you want to talk religion and politics in the U.S. in 2019, there’s one person we should all be quoting, and his name is Rev. Dr. William Barber II. If you haven’t heard this man preach yet, open a new tab or set down the paper and log onto the internet at home or at the library and prepare to have your mind and your heart opened. Often wearing his stole embroidered with the words, “Jesus was a poor man,” Rev. Dr. Barber is that sort of preacher who brings together prophetic truth-telling and calls to action with the soaring rhetoric and inspiring words that make you believe we really can transform this world into a loving, equitable, and just community.

They’re not all sermons either — one of my favorite speeches he gave is the November 2016 keynote address at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, entitled, “Economics is About Making Moral Choices,” in which he says, “The shortest war we’ve ever fought is the war on poverty, and it did not fail — it was undermined. ... We must apply now a moral defibrillator to our own hearts and be even more determined to stand for love and justice and mercy.”

Formerly the president of the North Carolina NAACP, Rev. Dr. Barber led the Moral Mondays movement that spread across the country, inspiring people to redefine morality in terms of social justice and call on government to spend our tax dollars on enacting policies that provide for people’s basic needs and restore dignity. It’s no wonder that this community organizer and pastor is the one leading the charge to revitalize Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign fifty years after it first began.

The New Poor People’s Campaign is part of the work of the group Repairers of the Breach, a nonpartisan non-profit organization that works to organize communities to advocate for the policy goals of their inspiring document, “The Higher Ground Moral Declaration,” also worth opening in another tab here while you’re researching all this. Rev. Dr. King is quoted often and at length in the supporting documents of the Poor People’s Campaign, and I’d invite you to commit a few of those passages to memory especially for this upcoming week in which you are guaranteed to hear Rev. Dr. King’s words trivialized, sentimentalized, and cherry-picked until it sounds like the civil rights icon wasn’t a revolutionary firebrand but a patient rule-follower who just wanted us all to get along and sit at the same table once in a while.

Instead, Rev. Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign was a challenge to the powers and principalities of the United States to love all of our neighbors and treat everyone equally, beginning to restore the horrific imbalance of resources that still remains from our shameful national legacy of conquest, genocide, slavery, racism, and bigotry as policy in all its forms. Without addressing the root causes of poverty and the systemic injustices our economic system perpetuates, little is going to change. A true overhaul and redistribution of resources is overdue.

Rev. Dr. Barber’s Detroit speech quoted in the first paragraph concludes, “To those who call for healing, remember you can’t have healing without treatment. We can’t say peace where there is no peace. We must treat the soul of our nation, treat this racism. To the faithful, it is our time even now to be in the public square.”

Churches, it is wonderful that we are meeting the immediate needs of the community with donations of food and shelter and services, but until we all can also articulate what systems are at work here that have created poverty, homelessness and need, and actively work to implement policy changing those systems, we have a long way to go before we can say we’re doing the work Rev. Dr. King called us to.

Rev. Violet Johnicker is the pastor of Brooke Road United Methodist Church in Rockford. Twitter: @violetj Email: violet@the-brooke.org

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